Simon Stalenhag

Paints Swedish suburbs and farmland in the eighties and nineties, exactly as remembered, and then puts a decaying machine the size of a house in the field behind the children.

Tales from the Loop is an art book with fragments of narration, built around an underground particle accelerator beneath the Mälaren valley, and the mood comes entirely from the gap between the ordinary childhood and the enormous rusting thing nobody comments on.

Stålenhag trained as a natural history illustrator. The books became a roleplaying game and then an Amazon series, and the paintings remain the work.